This evening, I noticed that I was having some horrible Internet connectivity issues, from home. Trying to stream anything online? Forget it. Frustrated, I started troubleshooting the issue, fully expecting that I would end up opening up a trouble ticket with my ISP, sending them all my available troubleshooting information, and asking them to resolve their issue.

Turns out, the issue was a simple fix – on my side, but I figured that I would provide my troubleshooting steps as a learning experience for anybody whom runs across this page.

The first thing that I did was go to http://speedtest.rackspace.com. From this page, you can run the OOKLA speedtest application from any of their data centers. This provides excellent information on download & upload speeds, latency, and jitter. I ran the test from the Dallas and Chicago data centers. Right off the bat, I noticed that I was getting a fraction of the download speed that my Internet service is configured for. This can be seen below:

This immediately pointed to a real issue, but I didn’t yet have all the information that I needed to take to my ISP. Next, I used an application called MTR. MTR is a traceroute application, that when ran correctly makes it visually easy to spot potential network issues. I ran an MTR report destined to one of my cloud servers at Rackspace.

You look at the ‘loss%’ column, you will notice that the MTR reports packet loss, starting at hop 4. This packet loss continues at every hop in the path. Hop 4 is the gateway of my Cable Internet. This suggests that the actual network issue exists between my cable modem and my providers router. To further solidify this finding, I ran a 100 count ping to that same server, hosted at Rackspace.

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---xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ping statistics---

100packets transmitted,91packets received,9.0%packet loss

round-trip min/avg/max/stddev=19.296/31.589/49.183/7.557ms

Fri Mar1301:53:43CDT2015

Indeed, the ping saw the same packet loss. Before opening a ticket with my Internet provider, I decided to power cycle my cable modem. After my cable modem was back online, I ran the same tests.